Saturday, August 30, 2008

I know from comments on this blog a lot of readers are watching for a new release of Gesture Magic, this is still at the front of my mind and is part of this schedule

Since I've been quite busy recently and job hunting I haven't had as much time to spare for work on the schedule as I would have liked. There have been a few updates, a few given feedback from readers of the blog:

Aerofoil 1.4.4 and a native version will be published sometime within the next week, this is small improvement to hibernate without a new process call, and a native version to improve memory usage (i.e. make it smaller when running, not the executable file size).

LocateMe 1.0.1 had a small amount of source code changes by me to make it a little bit more structured, and should support Java phones with a built in GPS (unfortunately the chap who emailed me the changes never kept in contact to say if they worked). Nonetheless I'll update this and post it as an unsupported alpha version when I get time or if you drop me an email at: uk co silentsoftware at ben (reverse add punctuation)

Vampire Castle has had all of it's main game graphics finished (but no menu system yet) I'm still hoping to get this completed within the next couple of weeks, and still roughly on schedule.

Gesture Magic is currently under investigation for an issue slowing graphics drawing down on some single core machines - a threading issue down to the fact it was built on a prototype/proof of concept version.

Monday, August 11, 2008

Calum at http://calum.org has provided a patch for phone integrated GPS units with a modified version of LocateMe 1.0 which he uses with his Nokia N95. The modification was limited to just showing the location (and setting a target) but I've updated the patch further so it can also send and receive location "target" texts (viewing satellites unfortunately isn't possible yet) but as I don't have a phone with an integrated GPS I don't know if the code works (yep I'm a cheapskate). I'm just waiting for Calum to do a small spot of testing for me (I hoping he'll oblige) and then I'll release the changes, otherwise I'll do it in a couple of weeks.

If anybody else wants to test this for me please drop me a comment - thanks.

Thursday, August 07, 2008

I'm overdue for a blog post due to job searching, DIY and spending time on graphics for my Nintendo DS game, The Fruit Machine - Vampire Castle. The graphics (vampire and all) were drawn by hand on paper, scanned and GIMPed, reels were shaded and rendered using my own utility program (apologies for the quality of screenshot - the jpegs were compressed with MS Snipping Tool). As you might expect, I'm not a graphics designer so this has been the longest part (particularly lighting up the sprites, i.e. on and off states). The bottom screen is complete (yes the trail is meant to look a little amateurish, a "cartoony" look against the realism of the buttons and reels), I'm still working on the top. As for sound, well I spent a good £5 sampling random fruit machines at a local arcade, so my own hard earned money went into this, all in the name of research of course.

The code is only ~10% complete just enough to load sprites and play some rudimentary button, reel and collect sounds, this allows me to test the graphics and noises. Basically it's a sound board. The good news is I don't think the program and logic will take long to code and I have a basic idea of the code design structure.In case you were wondering - the box with text in on the lower screen is a scrolling LCD style display - not a code crash :)

There's also going to be a (nice) surprise for anyone who wins the jackpot prize.

As for the source code, well I haven't yet decided whether to make it open source, but it will probably be GPL 2.